Operating a conventional jobsite such as a construction site or mine may involve maintaining various fleets of different vehicles and/or work machines. The cost of preventive maintenance and general upkeep for such vehicle fleets can be a major expense depending on, for example, the size of the fleet and the type of vehicles in the fleet. Repairing and/or replacing vehicle tires may be one of the highest costs of maintaining such fleets. For example, in some mining jobsites, replacing the tires on a single vehicle may cost more than $150,000. Thus, in an effort to reduce jobsite operating and/or tire maintenance costs, jobsite managers may use methods of monitoring tire and vehicle condition. Some of these methods may involve the manual visual inspection of vehicle tires when the vehicle is stopped, such as, for example, during a shift change. During a shift change, a vehicle operator may inspect each tire of a particular vehicle and may record information corresponding to tire cuts, abnormalities, and/or other tire operating characteristics observed during the tire inspection. Alternatively, a tire may be fitted with a tire sensor configured to sense various tire operating characteristics.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,705,155 (“the '155 patent”) describes an apparatus and method for monitoring tire conditions. The method of the '155 patent includes measuring the temperature and pressure of each tire, and transmitting a signal from one of the tires representative of the above tire conditions. To provide for such monitoring, the '155 patent describes a transmitter device attached to each tire and configured to detect and transmit data representative of the temperature and pressure measurements.
Although the system of the '155 patent may detect aspects of tire condition, the system does not incorporate vehicle operating characteristic data in its evaluation of tire condition. Such a method may not enable a jobsite manager to accurately assess, for example, the causes of reduced tire life and may hinder the manager's ability to proactively improve jobsite conditions to prevent premature vehicle tire failure.
The system of the present disclosure is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.